Bush, US media respond to Stephen Colbert’s comic assault: “We are not amused”

With Bush seated only a few feet away, Colbert, as is his wont, impersonated a right-wing blowhard, calling on the president to ignore the polls (“Guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ‘reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias”) and praising the press for its subservience to the administration (“Over the last five years you people were so good—over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew”).

He skewered Bush: “I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound—with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.”

He zeroed in on “Fox News,” which “gives you both sides of every story: the president’s side, and the vice president’s side.” He suggested the way to handle “these retired generals causing all this trouble” was not to let them retire. Noting that he had seen retired Gen. Anthony “Zinni and that crowd” on television talk shows, Colbert continued, “If you’re strong enough to go on one of those pundit shows, you can stand on a bank of computers and order men into battle.”

Colbert deftly punctured Republican Sen. John McCain’s ‘maverick’ reputation: “Somebody find out what fork he used on his salad, because I guarantee you it wasn’t a salad fork. This guy could have used a spoon! There’s no predicting him.” He also urged his audience to enjoy a metaphor he employed about “boxing a glacier...because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.”

The comic implored the media not to report on “NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe.” Instead, “Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you’ve got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know—fiction!” This stung particularly sharply.

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The Washington Post, the Associated Press and Reuters all provided scant coverage of Colbert’s appearance. The television networks largely ignored his comments. As news of Colbert’s monologue spread, thanks to the Internet, certain in the media felt obliged to account for the initial silence. The New York Times assigned Jacques Steinberg the task of attempting to cover its particular posterior. Noting that Colbert’s comments were creating a great stir (Comedy Central had received 2,000 email messages by May 1), Steinberg wrote, “Others chided the so-called mainstream media, including The New York Times, which ignored Mr. Colbert’s remarks while writing about the opening act, a self-deprecating bit Mr. Bush did with a Bush impersonator. Some, though, saw nothing more sinister in the silence of news organizations than a decision to ignore a routine that, to them, just was not funny.”

This became the second line of defense. Colbert was simply not amusing. As if that were the issue! Colbert’s angry irony was certainly likely to go over the head not only of Bush, but of most members of the political and media establishment. He ridiculed American philistinism, in its own voice. Speaking of Bush, for example, Colbert explained, “We’re not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut—right, sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say ‘I did look it up, and that’s not true.’ That’s ‘cause you looked it up in a book.
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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/colb-m05.shtml